A Beautiful multi-sensory Natural play activity for children of any age to enjoy.

It’s super quick and easy to create ice cakes from scratch.

Just collect a heap of natural plant material, making sure that all plants and flowers are not toxic and safe to handle for everyone who will be playing with the ice cakes.

Add your collection into a cupcake mould.

You might like to plan the look of each cupcake so that it’s colour specific, has a certain quantity or type of plant or flower inside.

In this example we decided to mix all natural plants and petals together so that as the ice melts the children can discover each cakes contents and it gave a multicoloured and textures array of interest to the ice cakes.

Now add some water. Remember water expands as it freezes so fill to almost the top and pop into the freezer on a flat surface.

If you don’t have cup cake trays, you can try this using tuber-ware, foil pie cases or any freeze-able container.

Leave your Floral Ice Cakes to freeze.

Dependant on your frezzer and the depth of water I can take 2 hours for cup cake trays. (We froze ours over the weekend so that we could enjoy them with all the Kinder Harmony Children on their return back to the setting) If the weather is very cold why not leave your tray outside and explore how the outdoor temperature can free water.

When ready to play, pop your cakes out into a tray or somewhere you’re happy for water play. Let the children explore them. See what new language they can learn, plant names, colours or how they handle the ice cakes.

Top tip: Have a towel close by and some luke warm water incase the children would like to warm their fingers a little or dry off. Always closely supervise children when playing with plants and ice, incase of mouthing or allergic reactions.

Why not add some tools – you can be as inventive as you like with this. We add some wooden spoons tweezers and magnifying glasses so the children could enjoy some investigative play.

Add some food colouring to the defrosting Ice cakes, what happens?

I hope you’ve been inspired to try these frozen Ice cupcake for a sensory play experience.

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Happy Playing

Dominique